‘Mozart Effect’ Goes Only So Far, Study Says

Learning to make music and acting out stories can improve certain
thinking skills in children, but those activities will not raise
students' grades or SAT scores, according to a study released last week
by Harvard University's graduate school of education.

For More Information

The study is
available for $28 from Project
Zero by calling (617) 496- 7097.

"There have been a lot of claims made that the
arts make kids do better in school," said Ellen Winner, a senior
research associate at Project Zero, the division of the graduate school
that conducted the study, and a co- researcher of the project. "The
claims exceed the evidence."

Ms. Winner and her colleague, Lois Hetland, analyzed nearly 200
studies of arts education from the past 50 years. They concluded that
when children learned to make music, it improved their spatial-temporal
reasoning—a process that Ms. Hetland described as "the ability to
flip or rotate or turn images in your head through sequential steps of
problem-solving."

"I found a very specific link [from making music] to a very specific
cognitive skill," emphasized Ms. Hetland, a researcher in cognitive and
developmental psychology at Project Zero.

Mozart and Learning

The study also confirmed a finding known as the "Mozart effect," in
which listening to some kinds of music appears to improve
spatial-temporal reasoning. But the researchers note that the effect
was found only in college students and that it wore off within 10 to 15
minutes.

"That doesn't have much use educationally," Ms. Winner said.

Frances H. Rauscher, one of the researchers who originally
documented the Mozart effect, welcomed Project Zero's findings. She
sounded amused by the ways she says her study has been misinterpreted
by the public.

Numerous companies have presented products targeted at parents
suggesting that playing the music of Mozart to their children will make
them smarter. In Georgia, former Gov. Zell Miller asked the legislature
to pay for a program that would give classical-music CDs to mothers of
newborns as they left the hospital; recording companies eventually
picked up the tab.

"The claims are incredibly wild," said Ms. Rauscher, now an
assistant professor of cognitive development at the University of
Wisconsin-Oshkosh.

Researchers find
no proof that arts education raises grades.

The Project Zero researchers also found that enacting stories, rather
than just reading them, helped children with a variety of verbal
skills, such as writing and oral expression.

They did not, however, find a significant causal relationship
between the arts of any type studied—music, drama, visual arts,
or dance—and improvements in SAT scores, grades, or reading
scores.

Some other researchers and arts education advocates, though, said
the Project Zero study fails to show the full picture of the link
between arts education and students' academic achievement because its
scope is too narrow.

While the study reviewed 188 studies on arts education, it focused
on rigorous quantitative studies, not qualitative ones.

"By design, their purpose was to look at tightly controlled
quantitative studies from which causal inferences could be drawn," said
James S. Catterall, a professor of education at the University of
California, Los Angeles, and the director of Imagination Group, an
arts- research organization. "What that led them to is mostly studies
that look at standardized-test scores. In doing so, they looked at a
small fraction of what the arts has achieved."

He questioned the methodology of one aspect of the study, which he
said led the researchers to downplay the relationship between learning
piano-keyboard skills and students' improved math skills.

By averaging the effects of several kinds of music instruction, some
of which had less impact on math skills, the researchers glossed over
the value of keyboard instruction, Mr. Catterall maintained.

A researcher of drama education agreed that the Harvard researchers
had skipped over an important body of information in concentrating only
on quantitative studies.

One set of qualitative studies, by Philip Taylor, a drama education
researcher at Griffith University in Queensland, Australia, shows how
drama can help children gain a deeper understanding of social studies,
said Johnny Saldana, a professor of theater education at Arizona State
University and a researcher with the American Alliance for Theater and
Education.

"The study may give the false impression that the arts may not have
much value," said Mr. Saldana, who had read only an executive summary
of the study.

Protecting the Arts

The Project Zero researchers said they consider themselves to be
advocates for arts education. But they added that they hope to caution
people against justifying such instruction by claiming it teaches
skills that can be transferred to other subjects.

Such arguments put the arts in a vulnerable position, Ms. Winner
said. "As soon as someone comes along and shows that direct training in
math works better than teaching music to teach math, then there go the
arts."

It's better, she said, to justify the arts by highlighting what they
offer in themselves, such as how they allow for the expression of deep
personal meaning and how they enable children "to grapple with
open-ended, messy problems."

She and Ms. Hetland don't feel they've proved that there are no
situations in which skills learned in arts education can be transferred
to other school subjects. Rather, Ms. Winner said, "we're saying the
evidence is not there because the research is too weak."

The study, titled "The Arts and Academic Achievement: What the
Evidence Shows," was paid for by the Bauman Family Foundation and
published in the fall/winter issue of The Journal of Aesthetic
Education.

Ground Rules for Posting
We encourage lively debate, but please be respectful of others. Profanity and personal attacks are prohibited. By commenting, you are agreeing to abide by our user agreement.
All comments are public.